IN MY EARS #2: Question from The Octopus Drummer - Do We Have DIY in Beijing?

In My Ears is a weekly music column by Josh Feola 赵识, Beijing-based writer and musician and founder of pangbianr.com

Around the Douban Music office John Colpitts (aka Kid Millions, drummer of Brooklyn band Oneida) is still sometimes referred to as "章鱼鼓手": the octopus drummer. This is because of a cartoon drawn by one of Douban's staff when they brought Colpitts to China for two performances of his Man Forever percussion ensemble in 2014. I was lucky enough to participate as one of the drummers. At the time I was actually down to three limbs myself, having broken my knee a few weeks before, but luckily my part was on snare and I could perform sitting awkwardly.

I listen to Kid Millions to get better at drumming. His skills are fully audible on "What's Your Sign?", though buried in the heavy reverb of his band Oneida, and further looped, chopped, and reconfigured by avant-garde composer Rhys Chatham, a major inspiration for the early New York No Wave scene. The album cycles through different influences and phases of underground music history — opening track "You Get Brighter" wouldn't sound out of place on Black Flag's "My War"; "Well Tuned Guitar" could pass as a track missing from Can's "Lost Tapes". Kid Millions' precise and repetitive but also free and fluid drumming style is there throughout, an unmistakable fingerprint and pure manna for someone like me, who hopes to one day be a fraction as good as him.

Kid Millions, "The Octopus Drummer"

Besides jamming this album relentlessly over the last week, Kid Millions popped up in my mind recently for another reason. Actually, he popped up in my inbox. He's currently writing a review of "Goodnight Brooklyn", a documentary about the closing of DIY venue Death By Audio. Vice Media made an arrangement to take over an entire block in Brooklyn in 2014; Death By Audio was included within that, and promptly shut down. He asked me what "DIY" looks like in Beijing, or if it even exists here.

That's a bit hard to answer. "DIY", if you don't know, means "Do It Yourself", and describes a specific underground culture in the West, consisting of people (usually artists or musicians) who want their creative work to remain self-sufficient and non-commercial on every level. One thing I've come to realize over my seven years in Beijing is the lack of a cultural history and social infrastructure for "DIY" in China, compared to how I know it in the West.

My first experience with DIY was as a hardcore kid in high school, making a band, putting out our low-budget CD-R demo, making our own fanzine, interviewing touring bands who played in my hometown, etc. Most underground American musicians have a similar story. We stand on the backs of '80s punk/hardcore bands like Black Flag, who figured out how to book their own national tours decades before the internet, and long before mobile phones were widely available. DIY in the West also has deeper historical roots, tracing back to counter-cultural and avant-garde movements of the 1960s such as Fluxus.

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Death By Audio

Obviously, China was more or less closed off from all of this until at least 1978. An underground rock music scene was slowly born here in the '90s, and has grown into a pretty incredible hybrid today, due to factors like globalization, the internet, social networking, and, most recently, innovations in the use of smartphones and apps.

Today, in some corners of China's underground music scene, there is some DIY activity. My friend Zhu Wenbo, for example, runs a cassette label (Zoomin' Night), books shows in unconventional venues like public underpasses, designs most of his event posters himself, prints the posters and promotes the shows himself, and often participates in the shows as a performer. But there aren't very many people like Zhu Wenbo, and things like cassette labels or DIY print zines are more intentionally retro and anachronistic than something that can sustain and activate a vital local scene in this digital age.

One of Zoomin' Night's public underpass shows in 2015

Indeed, it's hard to be DIY in Beijing. Small venues friendly to DIY bookers and bands — 2 Kolegas, Zajia Lab, XP, Old What, and quite a few more — have closed one by one over the last few years, for reasons including clashes with authority, rising rents, and diminishing revenues. As a result, larger, more commercial music brands like Modern Sky and Tree Music gain more influence as they face less competition, and actively maneuver to establish a monopoly on the independent music scene. Even lifestyle brands that use live music events as a promotional strategy — Vice Media is a big one here, as in Brooklyn — benefit from the lack of DIY activity, since their objective is to push forward a commercialized version of a culture that was originally created by people more interested in the art than financial gain.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? I applaud brands like Vice and Converse for exposing more people to underground music in China, but are they creating fans or consumers? The problem with a company like Vice claiming to be an authority on underground music is that it doesn't contribute much to the people actually making this music. In some ways, brands like Vice actually make it more difficult for an organic, non-commercial underground music scene to flourish. These brands are, in fact, capitalizing on the sound and style of bands that they had no role in shaping, and will forget once the fashion changes, as it does often.

So your homework this week is to think about what form "DIY" can take in Beijing. Maybe the way that younger people in the scene today are using apps like Wechat to figure out new ways to organize themselves and broadcast their thoughts and music is a potential new form of DIY that makes a lot of sense in Beijing. But maybe you have a better idea.

Associated Douban pages

About the author

Josh Feola is a writer and musician based in Beijing. He’s organized music, art, and film events in the city since 2010, via his label pangbianr and as booking manager of live music venues D-22 and XP. His ongoing event series include the Sally Can’t Dance experimental music festival and the Beijing Electronic Music Encounter (BEME). He has written about music and art for publications including The Wire, LEAP, Sixth Tone, and Tiny Mix Tapes. He also co-authors the Gulou View opinion column for the New York Observer. As a musician, he formerly played drums in Beijing band Chui Wan, recording on and touring behind their debut album, White Night. He currently plays drums in SUBS and Vagus Nerve, and also records and performs under the name Charm.